Hulu.com is an amazing website.
An ironic partnership between Fox and NBC, Hulu is a video sharing site featuring high-quality, professional videos from each network’s primetime shows and webisodes — including the popular Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, and Family Guy. Since it’s inception just over a year ago, Hulu has also added plenty of extra content to its ranks, including viral video machines The Daily Show and The Colbert Report — and unlike YouTube, Hulu shows many of those programs in the form of full episodes, and even quite a few in HD.
And of course, the fix for YouTube was in as soon as Hulu launched. Unlike other online content ventures from major media outlets, Hulu allows their videos to be imbedded in one’s blog or website — even full episodes. Now, it appears as though Hulu will very quickly surpass YouTube in terms of advertising revenue:
The feat suggests traditional media companies can make money online without having to cede control to Google, as the music industry did to Apple, whose iTunes music store dominates the digital music market.
It also shows the difficulties other social networks might have in generating revenues from their amateur content.
Obviously, the ability to become associated with professional, monitored content is more appealing — for now — to advertisers than appearing on random YouTube viral videos is. That easily explains why Hulu’s 6 million visitors is currently pulling in nearly as much as YouTube’s 80 million. But I still believe that advertisers skittishness toward online advertising is on its way out, however slowly.
Why Coke or Pepsi or Budweiser thinks that flashing their logo on TV and in magazines is more valuable than flashing it on a website is beyond me. Branding is branding, and they can reach just as many people on Facebook as they can in Maxim Magazine — only in Maxim, readers cannot click on their logo and be taken directly to the product’s website. Yet advertisers still complain about “low click-through rates” — a marvelous concept that doesn’t even exist in other advertising mediums, but still manages to disappoint CEOs.
Once the internet becomes as integrated in our society as television, Hulu will have to have an audience, not just a product, to rival YouTube’s. Until then, congratulations to them. They’ve succeeded where other media companies have failed miserably for a decade.
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